Mentoring in the Digital Age: A survey and guidelines
Last year, the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring hosted a pre-summit short course on Mentoring in the Digital Age. The short course was packed with thoughtful presentations by leading scholars and lively discussions about the impact of social media on mentoring relationships. Post-doctoral fellow Sarah Schwartz unveiled the results of an ambitious, international survey of mentors and staff’s social media practices, and this was followed by a panel discussion with Belle Liang, Sarah Kremer, Renee Spencer, Bernadette Sanchez, and Janis Kupersmidt. A highlight was the series of roundtable discussions in which practitioners and experts discussed the day-to-day conundrums and complexities that texting, Facebook, and other forms of social media have introduced into their practice. We puzzled through an array of questions with the goal of creating a uniform standard of best practice around social media in youth mentoring. This will be our challenge in the coming months, as we reflect on the many points that were raised and determine how to update the Elements of Effective Practice and the youth mentoring Code of Ethics to encompass the ever-expanding modes of connection. We also focused on these issues in a new study which contains survey results and guidelines, co-authored by a number of the featured panelists.
Visit the short course website to hear the speakers, read their articles, and learn more.
